Reflections on Rick Perry's Response Rally: Attack on the Love Ethic and Corporatist Puppet-Masters

I didn't watch Rick Perry's Response rally this weekend.  I took last week as a kind of retreat-discernment week, and as I did so, I deliberately weaned myself of all but the most essential news coverage.  

Diana Butler Bass on Continued Attempt of U.S. Religious Right to Use African Christians in American Culture Wars

Huffington Post recently carried a fine article by Diana Butler Bass, author of A People's History of Christianity (NY: Harper, 2009).  It's about a topic re: which I've blogged repeatedly in the past: the misreading of African versions of Christianity by Western Christians intent on using Africans and the churches of Africa as pawns in lethal culture-war games in the West.

It Takes a Village: Abby Scheer on Keeping the Media Honest re: American Churches and Anti-Gay Movements in Africa

The Ugandan story continues to simmer. I recommend Gwen Thompkins’ summary of what’s taking place in that nation, vis-à-vis gay citizens, on NPR’s “Morning Edition” today. Thompkins concludes unambiguously that the ultimate objective of the Ugandan legislation is “to remove gay people from society.”

She also notes the close ties of American conservative evangelicals, including Rick Warren and Scott Lively, to Ugandan leaders. As I’ve noted previously, Lively is president of a group, Abiding Truth Ministries, classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-gay hate group (and see here and here).

I welcome the mainstream media’s attempt to deal with a story to which it has paid insufficient attention in the past—the connection of American churches to anti-gay extremism in African nations. I also welcome the spotlight now focused in these media reports on extremists like Scott Lively.

At the same time, I think what may be lost sight of, now that the media have finally recognized the significance of the African anti-gay story (and its religious roots in the United States), is the following: it’s not merely extreme right-wing evangelical religious groups that have fanned the flames of anti-gay hatred in Africa. It’s “moderate” and mainline churches that are implicated in the outbreak of homophobic hate in Africa, as well.

Abby Scheer alluded to this important backstory in a powerful statement at Religion Dispatches earlier this week. Scheer argues that it has taken a village to get the story of what’s occurring in Uganda into the mainstream media. As she observes this, she also suggests the odds against which those trying to get the story into the media have had to work:

U.S. conservative evangelicals operating in Africa have seemed untouchable–and now they are not because of credible research establishing Rick Warren’s role in fomenting homophobia in Africa, and the strong and brave work of human rights groups in publicizing the threat.

The credible research to which Abby Scheer is pointing in the preceding statement is the recent Public Eye report, Globalizing the Culture Wars: U.S. Conservatives, African Churches, and Homophobia by Zambian Anglican priest Kapya Kaoma (and here), about which I blogged in October. Rev. Kaoma presents a compelling, well-documented case for the thick involvement of American evangelicals in African anti-gay movements.

The primary reason that U.S. religious leaders working to foment hostility of gays in Africa have been “untouchable” in the mainstream media until recently is that those religious leaders have been not only extremist figures like Lively, but are, in many cases, “moderate” leaders of mainline churches. Who are acting with strong support from leading Catholic neoconservative activists . . . .

I’ve told my own pieces of this backstory on this blog. As I’ve noted, I became aware of how influential leaders of mainline churches in the U.S. were promoting homophobia in African churches in order to block inclusion of gays in American churches through my work in two United Methodist colleges from the mid-1990s up to 2007. Both were United Methodist HBCUs.

Through my close contact with Methodist bishops and clergy in these two institutions, as well as with African-American academic leaders who had been trained in the governing structures of the UMC, I became aware that there are exceptionally strong movements in the UMC—a mainline, “moderate” church—that are actively working to promote homophobia in African churches, in order to justify the continued exclusion and denigration of gays within the UMC in the United States.

The game that these religious groups play is as follows: they export and grow homophobia in the churches of Africa by encouraging African Christians to think that homosexuality is a decadent Western import to Africa, and that Methodists advocating for full inclusion of gay people in the church are imperialists seeking to impose Western cultural norms in developing nations. Then they turn around and tell their religious confreres in the United States that they are wounding the global church by campaigning for full inclusion of gays, because the Christians of the developing world are culturally predisposed against tolerance of gay people.

As my previous postings about this process within the United Methodist Church (which has parallels in other mainline Protestant denominations including the Episcopal Church/Anglican communion) have noted, this anti-gay movement spearheaded by religious leaders in the U.S. who are using African Christians in a Western political battle is extremely well-funded. It has strong political ties, and is more than a religious movement.

It is actively promoted by groups like the well-heeled and politically powerful Institute on Religion and Democracy, which has, for some time now, deliberately sought to divide mainline Protestant churches by stirring up the gay issue (and other political hot-button issues). The ultimate agenda of the IRD appears to be to induce enervating battles in mainline Protestant churches over such hot-button issues in order to diminish their potentially powerful social witness.

At recent UMC General Conferences, the IRD has gone so far as to provide African members of General Conference with cell phones to which IRD representatives text messages that instruct African delegates about how to vote on key legislation. For documentation of this claim, and citations of extensive research on the connection between the IRD and the UMC, see the links provided below.

One other point deserves attention here. As the links below will also demonstrate, there is strong Catholic influence in the IRD and, through this and other neoconservative political groups seeking to diminish the social witness of mainline Protestant churches. To sum up the story of American church involvement in anti-gay movements in Africa by pointing only to right-wing Protestant groups is to miss a significant part of the story.

The script being promoted by groups like the IRD and its cronies in mainline Protestant churches—a script that seeks to block greater inclusion of LGBT persons within American churches on the ground that such inclusion divides the global church—is also powerfully at work in the commentary of influential American Catholic journalists such as John Allen. This script is, in my view, all about seeding an irresistible, dominant meme in the mainstream media which views movements for full inclusion of gays in the churches as insensitive to the wishes of Christians of the developing nations, and as divisive of the global church.

And that’s to say that the objective of those working to plant this meme in the mainstream media is every bit as political as, if not more political than, a religious objective. The goal of American religious groups fomenting anti-gay prejudice in the churches of the developing world is to halt the progress of gay rights movements in the United States and other Western countries. And it is, as well, to further the enervating battles within the churches over such issues, in order to weaken the social witness of churches in sociopolitical discussions.

Abby Scheer is absolutely correct: Rick Warren and other American religious figures working to promote homophobia in African churches have been untouchable, and it has taken considerable work—it has taken a village—to get the mainstream media to touch this story. The reason these religious figures have been untouchable is that they are the religious expression of powerful political movements that are all about thwarting progressive political and social change in the West. And those powerful political movements have considerable influence not only in the far-right of American religion. Their influence is considerable within mainline Protestant churches and the Catholic church as well.

The media know this, and have been unwilling to name the cynical game that these groups are playing until now for that reason. For my previous discussions of these points, which provide documentation to substantiate them, please see the following preceding Bilgrimage posts:

Week’s End News Roundup: Religious Right and Anti-Gay Hate

Dirty Money: The United Methodist Church and the IRD

Further Digging: The UMC and the IRD

The IRD and Its Connections to the UMC: Research Conclusions

Lutherans Play Fair: ELCA Rejects Supermajority Maneuver for Vote on Gay Ministers

Some fascinating developments are taking place these days at the churchwide assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA). The meeting is happening right now in Minneapolis.

Monday night, ELCA delegates defeated a motion that would have required a two-thirds majority to pass a resolution permitting openly gay clergy in partnered relationships to serve ELCA congregations. The motion to require a supermajority rather than a simple majority to pass this resolution was defeated by a vote of 57 to 43 percent (and see here).

What I want to say about this vote links to what I wrote several weeks ago about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s new procedural rules for changing the mind of churches about gay issues. As I noted in my postings commenting on those rules (here and here), Rowan Williams’s procedural rules for changing the church’s moral mind about homosexuality effectively create insuperable obstacles for those who think the Anglican church can and should reassess its views about homosexuality.

Rowan Williams now holds (a departure from his previous position) that the scriptures are unambiguous in their condemnation of homosexuality, and that the church has always and universally condemned homosexuality. He proposes that the church can change its mind about gay people and gay lives only as a result of ongoing study, more dialogue, and, finally, widespread consensus supporting such a change.

As my postings about Rowan Williams’ procedural rules argue, these rules are a formula for stasis. They set the bar so impossibly high that the church will not ever revise its teaching about gay people and gay lives, no matter how strong the calls for change are within church and society. These rules lock the church into an endless round of futile discussion, debate, and study of issues about which most people have long since made up their mind, and regarding which they want the church to make an unambiguous, clear statement. One way or the other.

The rules also overlook the historical evidence about how churches change their moral mind (and the fact that churches have often changed their moral mind after holding an unambiguous position on a moral matter for centuries). Churches shift their moral consensus only when groups, both within and outside churches, catch sight of a new way of viewing things that is more consistent with the fundamental values of Christianity, and then begin to pressure (and shame) the church into admitting that its traditional stance belies its core values—and central aspects of scriptural teaching.

Churches don’t change their moral minds as a result of majority votes. They certainly don’t change their moral minds as a result of supermajority votes. The requirement that a church shift its understanding of a moral issue (and of the lives of those affected by that issue) on the basis of majority votes—let alone supermajority votes—implicitly places power in the hands of those who already wield power, and who usually have a vested interest at keeping change at bay.

I have been sensitized lately to the mechanisms by which churches continue to keep gay people and gay lives in a holding pen through manipulation of procedural roles by a book I’ve mentioned previously on this thread. This is Grif Stockley’s study of the history of race relations in Arkansas, Ruled by Race.

Stockley’s picture of what happened in Arkansas (and throughout the South) in the Jim Crow period is horrifying. It is a reminder of how procedural rules and the ballot box can be used—often systematically and ruthlessly—to reduce entire groups of people to the status of despised objects.

As Stockley notes, with emancipation and Reconstruction, African-American citizens of Arkansas began to vote and to serve in public office. Even as Reconstruction ended, some white citizens worked with black citizens to develop a “fusion politics” (p. 92) that continued to open doors for black enfranchisement and public service, though those doors were not so numerous following the end of Reconstruction as they had been just after emancipation.

And then all doors slammed shut—decisively and violently. All over the South, African-American citizens entered a long nightmare of disenfranchisement and violence that was totally dependent on legal enactments pushed through state legislatures by white majorities, which were then upheld by courts as the will of the majority. In 1891, election “reforms” were enacted that used literacy tests in draconian ways to disenfranchise large numbers of black voters (p. 125).

Then, when black voters could no longer vote because of the 1891 “reforms,” legislatures passed a poll-tax amendment that further disenfranchised some black voters who had passed the bar of the literacy test (ibid.). The predictable outcome of these political machinations by a white majority intent on returning African-American citizens to quasi-servitude was violence. As Stockley notes, “Suddenly it was open season on Arkansas blacks” (p. 127) and by 1892, lynchings peaked both in the South and the nation at large (pp. 117, 126)—and they continued well into the 1930s in many places.

Deprive people of the power to vote; manipulate a political system so that, if their vote has the power to change things (lynchings were worst in black-majority counties in Arkansas), a vote is not permitted: violent repression is the only possible next step, particularly when those people have tasted liberation and know things can be otherwise. And that repression (with carefully crafted acts of violence) will go on as long as a “majority” has the right to make the rules, bend them to keep itself in power, and turn for support to courts and legislators that happen to be—you guessed it—the same folks as those who constitute the “majority.”

And now segue back to what has just taken place at the ELCA assembly. On Friday, delegates will vote on a task-force recommendation that, if it passes, will permit individual ELCA churches and synods to recognize and support lifelong committed gay relationships, and to call to ministry those living in such relationships.

As Phil Soucy notes on the Goodsoil Central blog, on Friday, delegates will vote on both this recommendation and another on human sexuality, which discusses the theological basis for the current ELCA understanding of that topic. Since the latter recommendation—the Social Statement on Human Sexuality—is what the ELCA calls a “social” statement, it requires a two-thirds majority to pass. It does so because that is one of the procedural rules of ELCA assemblies vis-à-vis social statements.

The ministry recommendation is not a social statement, and requires only a simple majority to pass. So some delegates who are opposed to this recommendation—that is, to the acceptance of openly gay clergy in lifelong committed same-sex relationships—proposed a change in the rules. They wanted not a simple majority vote but a supermajority vote to be applied to this recommendation, in order for it to pass.

It was that change in the rules that the ELCA delegates defeated by a 57-43 percent vote on Monday evening. When the bishop of the Allegheny Synod, Gregory Pile, proposed that the ministry issue is so “serious” that it requires a supermajority vote, Ronald Pittman, a delegate of the Oregon Synod, noted in response that previous votes to bar openly gay candidates from ministry had required only a majority vote, not a supermajority.

In other words, as long as those opposed to changes in the ELCA’s position about gay people and gay lives had a clear and predictable majority, a simple majority was fine. When they appear to be losing turf to their opponents, suddenly these issues require a new, higher bar, in order for change to be considered: they require a supermajority.

Which is in itself a fascinating admission—a very telling one—on the part of many of those in the churches who oppose opening the doors to gay people and gay lives. For ever so long, we’ve been told that the will of the majority needs to hold sway and rule, that it’s all about respecting what the majority wants.

Now that a shift is occurring in society at large and within the churches, such that those opposed to full inclusion of gay people and gay lives in the churches are beginning to be in the minority, suddenly these issues become “serious” and demand a supermajority if we intend to entertain change. In light of that societal (and ecclesial)* shift, it’s fascinating to read the headlines of Archbishop Chaput’s influential Catholic News Agency reporting on the ELCA vote: CNA is reporting that the Lutherans have now established a “low threshold” for changes in their stance on gays in ministry.

A majority vote is now a low threshold? In whose universe and on what planet, I wonder? As Michael Bayly insightfully notes on his Wild Reed blog, Catholics could stand to learn something of value about catholicity from watching our Lutheran brothers and sisters engaging in dialogue at this ELCA assembly.

As Emily Eastwood of Lutherans Concerned points out (here and here), this procedural vote does not necessarily presage a majority vote on behalf of the ministry recommendation. Even so, it’s an important vote to note for two reasons.

First, the attempt to change the rules after years of simple majority votes were used to exclude openly gay ministry candidates in the ELCA provides a striking illustration of how procedural rules—and plain old Machiavellian treachery—have long been used in deliberations of church assemblies to stack the deck against those who call for decent treatment of gay and lesbian human beings. It’s time for those fighting against full inclusion of gays and lesbians to stop employing deceitful procedural tricks (and arguments) to support their cause. They are undermining the moral persuasiveness of their cause.

Second, the vote indicates that increasing numbers of Christians are becoming fed up with those deceitful tricks, and want open, respectful dialogue in their churches—not political maneuvers to keep dialogue at bay. I take heart from the ELCA vote, and I tip my hat to my Lutheran brothers and sisters for insisting that, whatever the outcome of this battle happens to be, it will at least be fought honorably and in the light.

Meanwhile (and as a counterpoint to this story), there’s the situation of the United Methodist Church. As a good friend of mine, an ordained minister and theologian with a foot in both the Presbyterian and the United Methodist Church emailed me to say this week, the UMC is actually moving backwards, when it comes to gay people and gay lives. I share that perception, and this development concerns me because 1) it’s at such variance with the Wesleyan tradition and the history of Methodism, and 2) Methodists exert great influence in American culture because they are the church of Main Street USA. As go Methodists, so goes the nation.

The homepage of the well-funded right-wing Institute on Religion and Democracy has a scrolling headline right now which is crowing that the Methodists have just defeated a “gay-related” membership policy. This links to an article by Daniel Burke at Christianity Today which notes that 27 of 44 UMC regional conferences rejected an amendment that would have prevented individual churches from denying membership to people simply because they are gay.

That amendment, which would have declared that membership in Methodist churches is open to "all persons, upon taking vows declaring the Christian faith, and relationship in Jesus Christ," was approved by delegates to last year’s UMC General Conference. Approval of it required a two-thirds vote by annual conferences. Of those annual conferences using the supermajority mechanism to continue telling gay people we are not welcome in Methodist churches, the large majority are in Southern states.

The same states that bent every rule possible in the 19th century to disenfranchise black voters and return African-American citizens to quasi-servitude. I’d like to encourage my Methodist brothers and sisters to take a good look at what just happened among their Lutheran brothers and sisters. Perhaps we can all learn valuable lessons from what the ELCA did on Monday evening.

* 61% of ELCA clergy recently reported to pollsters that they think the churches have a moral obligation to work for full inclusion of LGBT people in society.

Flying Saints and Anglicans Crossing the Tiber

Wow. The saints are really getting around these days. First the Vatican up and flies Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati from Italy to Sydney for World Youth Day. Party on down, Bl. PG!

Now, there’s talk of exhuming John Henry Newman and moving him to a more veneration-friendly site inside the city of Birmingham. Newman is now buried at Rednal Hill outside Birmingham, at his oratory’s country house. Sharing the burial site with him is his lifelong friend Ambrose St. John, regarding whose death Newman wrote, "I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband's or a wife's, but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or any one's sorrow greater, than mine."

In the year after St. John’s death, Newman made a written statement of his own express wishes for burial. The statement declares, “I wish, with all my heart, to be buried in Fr Ambrose St John’s grave—and I give this as my last, my imperative will.”

St. John was buried in a coffin draped with a pall bearing Newman’s cardinal’s motto, Cor ad cor loquitur. The lifelong friends share a tombstone with the inscription Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem.

It will be interesting to see whether Newman’s express wishes to be buried with St. John will be honored when Newman’s body is moved for wider veneration. Somehow, I doubt that St. John will be making this particular trek into Birmingham with Newman.

All this against the backdrop of the current deliberations in Lambeth. I have refrained from blogging much about what is going on with the Anglican communion, (hough it fascinates me) for two reasons. One is that I flatly do not trust all the publicity being generated by the media about Lambeth. The other is that there are so many facets to the story of what is happening in the Anglican communion today (in my view), that one can easily miss the real treasure for the bright bits of tinfoil over which the media wish us to twitter.

The untrustworthiness of media accounts: I blogged extensively about this issue during the recent United Methodist General Conference. Simply put, the mainstream media are in the pocket of well-heeled special interest groups like the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD). This and other groups deliberately working tensions within the worldwide Anglican communion to try to stop forward movement on ordination of women bishops and gay clergy have been adroitly successful at planting media soundbites about the dissolution of the Anglican communion.

As Lambeth begins, some blogs are reporting that IRD is jetting hold-the-line Anglicans to Lambeth from dioceses around the world. At the last gathering of the worldwide Anglican communion, a bishop in attendance told me, IRD and its allies set up a state-of-the-art media center in the conference grounds. From that center, instant messages could be beamed out around the world, to elicit instant pressure from the interest groups among the faithful seeking to hold the line on women and gays. The center also connected to delegates on the scene, to assure that they were bombarded with constant instructions about how to vote on various issues.

Or so I was told, and I do not doubt the word of the bishop telling me about these activities. Very similar reports arose at the latest United Methodist General Conference. The right wing of these churches is well-funded, and is intent on manipulating the consciousness of the public (and of church members) regarding issues such as women bishops and ordination of openly gay clergy and bishops.

And because IRD and its allies have abundant money and strong ties to important neoconservative political leaders in many places, the media listen,when IRD issues statements. Much of the fanfare about schism in the Anglican communion is a media frenzy emanating directly from IRD—which wants to divide the Anglican and Methodist (and Presbyterian) churches, insofar as it cannot force these churches to toe the neoconservative political line.

This is not to say that there are not strong divisions in worldwide Anglicanism. It is not to say that some kind of fraying will not occur in coming months. What I do want to underscore, however, is that anyone following the story of what is happening in the Anglican communion would be well advised to go beyond media soundbites, in trying to understand all the ramifications of this story.

In my view, when saints start jetting around the world and when their bodies are exhumed for easier veneration, something momentous is happening. The wish to move Newman is clearly linked to the Anglican story. This move is, in some respects, an in-your-face declaration on the part of the Roman Catholic church to the Anglican communion: see, we have the saint (and the sanctity); is it any wonder that those concerned to maintain fidelity to the ancient ways are now crossing the Tiber back to Rome?

When saints fly and jump from grave to grave, one can be assured that Christianity is, well, in a state of flux. The problem is to understand the precise nature of this flux.

There are dimensions to the story of the proposed move of some Anglican/Episcopalian bishops and whole parishes to Rome that are as baffling as the choice to make Blessed Pier Giorgio fly to Sydney or to dig up Newman’s body. Not a few of these bishops and parishes represent precisely the kind of macho-homophobic Christianity that tormented Newman throughout his life.

Newman was nelly. The muscular evangelical Anglicans of his day—the Greg Venables—made no bones about it. In their view, the whole Oxford contingent, with its love of ecclesiastical lace and its infatuation with the smell of incense, had more than a little lightness in its loafers. In Newman’s period, the muscular Christians, for whom God made male and female and thus it ever shall be, would have as lief gone over to lace and incense as they’d have condemned the rapacious capitalism of captains of industry during the Victorian period.

And yet, today, it’s supposedly going to be these very folks—the saviors of Christianity from decadent, limp-wristed, lisping clergy—who are going to swim the Tiber. It’s supposedly going to be these folks who now kiss the ruby slippers of Benedict XVI and who flock to Birmingham to pray at Newman’s tomb—at the tomb of the saint their forefathers repudiated in his lifetime.

There are, of course, other Anglican contingents purportedly ready to go over to Rome. Those opposing the ordination of women bishops not uncommonly include many Anglo-Catholics who have always felt strong sympathy for Newman. If defections occur—if both Anglo-Catholics and muscular macho-homophobic Anglican evangelicals head to Rome—it will be very interesting to see how the tensions between the two play out once they are united in a new Roman Catholic configuration.

And how those tensions affect the Roman church itself. After all, one of the effects of taking in these refugees fleeing women bishops and (openly) gay clergy will be the implementation of more and more Anglican rites within the Roman communion. Which is to say, people will be praying differently than other Roman Catholics do—at a time when the Vatican is stressing the need for liturgical conformity and the return to older rites.

And the Anglicans will bring with them the pesky question of married clergy—to be specific, the pesky question of why Rome eagerly accepts married Anglican clergy defecting from Canterbury, while absolutely slamming the door against married clergy in the Roman rite.

A prediction: not a significant number of Anglicans will defect. But the exodus will be painted in media accounts as highly significant, as the splitting up of the Anglican communion. And another prediction: some of those who cross the Tiber will regret having done so, when they see how things work in the imperial system they are willingly reimposing on themselves. As Newman himself said after his conversion, those who want to ride serenely in the barque of Peter had best not look too closely what goes on in the engine room. If the worldwide clerical abuse crisis should have taught us anything, it is that imperial systems of governance, even in churches (or especially in churches?) all too often act imperious: they blithely ignore the will of those they govern; they willingly dupe when the imperial system is at stake—they willingly lie and dissimulate—and collude with worldly powers whose hands are not always immaculate.

Catholicism is, unfortunately, not the high-minded, morally upright business Newman dreamed it was, when he turned to Rome. And for that reason, one wonders about the unforeseen consequences of the choice to move his body. This choice is, of course, part and parcel of the same media-circus mentality that led the Vatican to jet Pier Giorgio Frassati to Sydney. It’s part and parcel of a strategy of image management that reduces the Christian message to easily appropriated soundbites—the kind of crude, instant, reduced and packaged-for-consumption information the clergy imagine the laity need in order to stay faithful.

But in the case of Newman, wider veneration may open up some unanticipated interest in the theology of a man who has not been canonized, in part, up to now precisely because his theology is simply so inconvenient for Rome. It was Newman, after all, who pointed out that in the Arian crisis, the sensus fidelium preserved orthodox understandings of the divine-human nature of Christ, when the clergy by and large had abdicated orthodoxy.

It was Newman who wrote that doctrines are not true if they are not received by the faithful. It was Newman who insisted that when the sensus fidelium differs significantly from a position handed down by the magisterium, the proper approach of the magisterium is not to enforce conformity, but to ask why the Spirit is speaking in such a different way among the people of God.

And it was Newman who once raised his glass at a banquet and proposed the following toast: to the Pope, yes. But to conscience first! These are hardly theological sentiments now governing the polity Rome wants to push on the faithful. What moldy, inconvenient theological ideas might we now cause to tumble forth, when we open Newman’s grave?

And, once again, what to do with St. John? Newman explicitly asked to be buried with his lifelong friend. It is no secret that another reason the Vatican has not moved forward quickly with Newman’s canonization cause is that he was thought to be, as a graduate-school classmate of mine once said, a bit of a homosexual.

What strange new energies might the Vatican be releasing now, in exhuming Newman and making him a saint, just as it receives converts from Albion’s shores fleeing the gaying up of the Anglo churches? What will it mean to the gay community to have, at last, one of us—one who wrote about the sorrow of losing a companion as deeper than the sorrow of losing a spouse—canonized at this strange, interesting moment in Christian history?

Ironically, Newman is just the nightmare so many of those muscular Christians now fording the Tiber are trying to escape . . . . Even as Rome opens it arms to the muscular Anglicans, it shoves the icon of a gay saint into the hands of those now arriving on Tiber's eastern shores. Perchance this will give gay-fleeing Anglicans a chance to pause and reflect more carefully about what it means to live within an imperial structure that brooks no opposition and conducts no polls to ascertain how its teachings are being received by the faithful.

Unsolicited Theological Reflections about the UMC and IRD

Note that this is part of a double posting following one I just made. That posting summarizes my recent research on the IRD and the United Methodist Church.

Unsolicited Suggestions about the UMC and the IRD in Future

No one has asked me for these. I offer these unsolicited theological reflections as 1) someone with many autobiographical connections to Methodism (have I mentioned, in addition to all I’ve said previously, that my father graduated from a Methodist college?); 2) as a theologian; 3) as someone sympathetic and indebted to Wesleyanism; and 4) as someone who has had an insider’s chance to observe (and, in some cases, be deleteriously affected by) how business is done in United Methodist institutions.

In my view, contemporary Methodism has both weaknesses and strengths that have made it susceptible to IRD infiltration, and also capable—in theory, at least—of combating those influences, if it chooses to do so. Choosing to do so will require a willingness of Methodist leaders to welcome critical reflections on the part of those working within United Methodist institutions--including outsiders to Methodism--who have gained a feel for what is happening in the Methodist church at a concrete level, from their work in Methodist institutions.

The strengths/weaknesses on which I want to focus are as follows:

▪ The Methodist tradition of seeking the “radical middle”;

▪Democratic polity, with the tradition of holy conferencing;

▪ A strong spirituality and tradition of practical social witness, coupled with a less-strong theological tradition, particularly in the area of ecclesiology.

Methodism is to be admired for its tradition of the radical middle. At best, this tradition discounts the wisdom and voice of no one. At best, it brings everyone to the table before decisions affecting the whole communion are made. Ideally, it fosters a discernment process in which all believers seek holy wisdom together, to guide church decision making as new challenges arrive at new points in history. Ideally, the tradition of the radical middle holds disparate groups together to allow the church to be authentically inclusive, authentically catholic—as church should be.

There are, however, some serious downsides to the tradition of the radical middle—as it is currently practiced by many Methodist institutions, at least. I saw and was adversely affected by those downsides in almost a decade of work in Methodist institutions of higher education.

When practiced in isolation from a theologically informed attempt to discern the path of holy wisdom within a Methodist institution, the tradition of the radical middle can easily become mere culture Christianity. When the radical middle is envisaged as some compromise between a bogus “truth” determined by right-wing operatives of the ilk of the IRD, and the Wesleyan tradition’s wisdom about social justice, it all too commonly turns into the path of least resistance—the path of cheap, rather than costly grace. The path of the radical middle can easily become plain conformity to culture.

I have made this argument in previous postings on this blog, citing my experiences in UMC institutions as well as other aspects of my life journey. I won’t try readers’ patience by belaboring those points again. What I would like to note here, though, is that, ironically, many of those now chiding the UMC to avoid becoming a church of culture rather than a countercultural church are, in their appeal to the radical middle, actually reflecting cultural norms.

Those norms make it easy to be a disciple of Jesus. They make us as followers of Christ comfortable. They do not require us to make hard decisions that set us at odds with our own cultural contexts—especially in the areas of gender and sexual orientation, or in the areas of fiscal stewardship and resistance to dirty money, insofar as our institutional purse strings are tied to holding the line on “traditional” teachings about gender and sexual orientation.

As I have said previously, my own thinking about these issues is highly influenced by my experience growing up in the American South during the Civil Rights struggle. This was a period in which I saw almost no white churches departing from the “radical middle” of Southern culture—and that consensus of the radical middle was racist. Instead of leading society at a time in which the church might have exercised prophetic countercultural leadership, the churches all too often merely mirrored social norms, citing scripture to justify their behavior.

I am therefore not conspicuously impressed by the professed repentance of these churches today for either their previous racism or misogyny. I cannot be impressed by this professed repentance when the leaders of these churches now behave towards LGBT members precisely the same way they did previously towards people of color and women.

Repentance means little when it costs nothing, now that cultural norms have made it easy to repent. Countercultural witness requires walking in costly grace in the here and now, within the cultural contexts in which we now live—and paying the price for such witness.

And when this repentance is attended by deceitful attempts on the part of these new defenders of people and color and women to promote token representatives of such groups--carefully tailored token representatives who do not rock the boat--I am even less impressed. This is a dishonest use of pretend-inclusivity and pretend-cultural sensitivity to combat the current outsider group, the LBGT children of God.

The Methodist emphasis on democratic polity and holy conferencing is admirable, an emphasis I would like very much to see adopted within my own Catholic tradition, with its tragically outmoded monarchical structures of leadership. At its best, gathering everyone around the table to discern the Spirit and make decisions together provides secular culture, in which bigger and better tables are always set for the rich and powerful, a powerful countercultural witness.

The tradition of democratic polity and holy conferencing can have a very strong downside, however—one of which I have had to become crucially aware in my work for United Methodist institutions. At its worst, rather than being a tool for holy consensus-building, democratic polity and holy conferencing can degenerate into a tool of control, in which those who have power over others abuse that power by suppressing alternative (and possibly prophetic) voices, and by playing one interest group against another with no consideration for competing claims of justice.

Some of the worst leadership I have ever witnessed in my entire life has been in UMC institutions. Those exercising this leadership were not merely terrible leaders. They were leaders who were well-schooled in UMC polity and the tradition of holy conferencing. And they were aided and abetted by Methodist bishops and Methodist ministers as they abused their leadership roles.

In the name of gathering everyone around the table and listening to every voice, some of these leaders practice outrageous, blatant triangulation. They abuse religious language and references to the Methodist way of doing business to pit one member of their team against another, claiming that only by setting one member against another can a true and truly comprehensive perspective be maintained.

I want to emphasize that this technique of triangulating managerialism within the United Methodist institutions in which I have worked is not an aberration of the UMC tradition of democratic polity and holy conferencing. Those practicing this blatant triangulation constantly reference the United Methodist tradition of democracy and holy conferencing, and their own training in that tradition (and in leadership) within the structures of the UMC.

In my experience working in United Methodist institutions, I have seen exceedingly ugly things done by leaders under the cover of this religious justification. I have seen leaders constantly dig for dirt on each person reporting to them, such that they could then use this negative data to try to keep team members in their place. When no dirt was to be found on some team members, I have seen leaders couple team members who were seriously trying to do their jobs with integrity to incompetent and unethical watchdog members of their teams. Those watchdogs, about whom the leader had damning information, were used to harass, report on, and try to rein in members seriously seeking to do their jobs with integrity.

I have seen leaders in United Methodist institutions, who claim that their goal in pitting one team member against another is to allow the full picture to be discerned, resort to top-down hierarchical models of leadership when their use of triangulation was challenged. In one institution, after proclaiming to her leadership team that her democratic style of leadership arose out of her experience working in the United Methodist Church, a leader immediately presented a flow chart of institutional authority depicting a triangle, with herself at the top. As she did so, she declared, “We are not a democracy.”

This experience has led me to conclude that leadership in the United Methodist Church actually often exercises top-down control techniques while talking the talk of democracy to cover over the lapses of democratic representation in leadership decisions. Effective leadership in any democratic institution requires who profess democratic ideals to hold these in creative tension with managerial goals.

In the Methodist context, church leaders and leaders of Methodist institutions need to be intentional and clear about how the Wesleyan tradition of democracy and holy conferencing informs their leadership style, even when they are adopting a managerial approach. Otherwise, not only can they betray the Wesleyan tradition in their leadership styles, but they can also end up committing the even worse sin of abusing religious language to justify leadership techniques that are imperious, insensitive, and in some cases, downright cruel and unethical.

Ultimately, the goal of managerial triangulation is always to maintain the status quo, in which those currently in leadership remain in leadership. Triangulating leaders have a vested interest in setting those they lead against each other, insofar as they want to retain their power. When the valuable Methodist tradition of democratic polity and holy conferencing is allowed to degenerate into managerial triangulation, and when such triangulation is attended by abuse of religious language, the institution remains stuck. It cannot move forward.

It cannot do so because the triangulation being practiced by its leaders disempowers those within the institution most capable of moving it forward. It disempowers prophetic voices—particularly those who speak from the margins—while lending credence to voices that do not have the best interest of the religious tradition and its institutions at heart, who should lack legitimacy in an institution that practices careful discernment. The triangulating technique of managerial leadership promotes carefully selected and sanitized examples of the disempowered to power, when it can be certain that these token representatives of the disempowered will behave in a way that does not call the status quo into question.

When the status quo is shaped by unequal distribution of power—and it always is—the church belongs unambiguously on the side of those with less power. Democracy-as-triangulation can become a smokescreen for serving the powerful of the world, when it refuses to give serious consideration to questions how power is justly to be distributed. Democracy-as-triangulation can be a smokescreen that legitimates the abuse of power (and enslavement to dirty money) when it treats the voices of mendacious apologists for unjust power as if they are just as compelling and deserving of attention as the voices of those delineating hard-earned critical truth from the margins—truth an institution needs in order to be faithful to its mission and to have a viable future.

These observations bring me to my final point: at its best, the warm-hearted Methodist spirituality derived from Wesley issues in a powerful tradition of practical social witness. At its worst, however, Methodism lacks carefully developed theological tools agreed on by the entire church to analyze and discuss its ecclesiology and whether its institutions mirror that ecclesiology authentically. Methodism at its worst often prescinds from much-needed critical questions about how Methodist institutions practice fidelity to and faithfully enact the Wesleyan tradition.

At its worst, such questions are dismissed in an anti-intellectual way as distractions from the warm-hearted piety that Methodism should really be all about, or as a critical breach with the radical middle. Methodists are strong on promoting justice. They are weak at talking about what justice actually is.

Methodists are good at listening to the voices of everyone. What the Methodist tradition often lacks, however, is a theological wisdom tradition to undergird its discernment process, so that the voices of impostors, opportunists, and poseurs can quickly be detected and will not distract the holy assembly from its deliberations.

And this makes Methodism susceptible to groups like the IRD, who know how to exploit these theological lacunae in the Methodist tradition very adroitly . . . .

Unfortunately--and more's the pity--some of the key members of the IRD are members of my own religious communion, whom I oppose as vociferously within the Catholic context as I do when they seek to meddle in the internal affairs of the United Methodist Church. For that reason, too, I feel it is important that Catholics concerned that Methodism be permitted to live its tradition authentically speak out against members of our communion who are trying to thwart the practice of authentic Wesleyan discipleship.

The IRD and Its Connection to the UMC: Research Conclusions

So, I can’t yet relinquish the Institute for Religion and Democracy (IRD) and its attempt to control the United Methodist Church’s path in the 21^st century. This subject fascinates me for all kinds of reasons—autobiographical, theological, scholarly.

And so, more ruminations and research . . . . In what follows, I want to offer two sets of reflections on the IRD and its attempted takeover of the future of United Methodism:

1. Some conclusions about IRD and its connection to contemporary Methodism;
2. And some totally unsolicited suggestions, from a theologian sympathetic to but outside the Wesleyan tradition, whose life experience has multiple connections to Methodism, about how the United Methodist Church might better withstand such attacks from political pressure groups in the future.

I’ll offer these in a diptych of postings, so that readers who have the patience to wade through either of them won’t be worn out or forced to read material that doesn’t capture their attention, in case they are interested in one rather than the other topic.

IRD and Its Connection to Contemporary Methodism

As I continue researching the IRD and its attempt to control the conversation within contemporary Methodism, I find that researchers repeatedly confirm a pattern I tracked (also citing research) in my two previous postings. The IRD employs techniques including the following to try to infiltrate worldwide Methodism and eliminate the social witness of the United Methodist Church:

▪ Stealth and behind-the-scenes manipulation;

▪ Attempts to co-opt the progressive social agenda of United Methodism, to represent itself as genuinely concerned about inclusivity and social justice (when it’s not), as a divide-and-conquer way of setting Methodist progressives against those resisting the Social Principles;

▪ Disingenuous profession of support for token representatives of some marginalized groups, coupled with unethical use of money to consolidate the loyalty of those groups (e.g., Christians of the global South, people of color, women), while setting these groups against other marginalized groups (e.g., LGBT people) to produce a schism that the IRD seeds, at the same time that it predicts schism if the UMC becomes truly inclusive of LGBT people;

▪ Illicit use of dirty money to play hard-ball political games within UMC institutions by bullying institutions that try to fulfill the Social Principles with threats of cutting off funding sources influenced by IRD and its donors;

▪ Deliberate dissemination of lies and misinformation to seed and exploit discontent among groups who have or believe that they have marginal status within the UMC—in particular, dissemination of lies and misinformation in well-funded stealth campaigns targeting Methodists of the global South, to engender suspicion of and contempt for LGBT believers and their allies in the global North, as well as resistance to women’s leadership in the church;

▪ Through this well-funded disinformation campaign, an attempt to create a poisonous intra-ecclesial climate in which the truth is systemically distorted, such that plain truth is so consistently pitched against outright lies, that people both within and outside the church are led to believe that the truth is somewhere between the lie and the plain truth;

▪ Adroit dissemination of media soundbites to ill-informed (and sometimes either lazy or corrupt) media sources to aid and abet the creation of a climate of systemic distortion of the truth within the church;

▪ Attempts to poison the traditional Wesleyan method of democratic consensus in decision making and of holy conferencing via such systemic distortion of the truth, in which outright lies set a spurious boundary for conversation, so that the church is kept forever in a situation of stasis between a false alternative and a viable one—and so that the UMC cannot move forward with its mission and ministry in the 21^st century.

The following are some useful sources I’ve just discovered, documenting the points above:

Andrew J. Weaver, et al., “IRD/Good News: How the Right Wing Targets United Methodist Women” (17 Nov. 2005), noted that the IRD has made adroit use of United Methodist church membership mailing lists sent to it over the years (often illicitly) by members of individual churches (see www.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=93, citing D. Stanley and M. Tooley, 1999 “Letter to United Methodists,” UMAction).

In 2004, when Republican Party operatives used this technique in the presidential campaign, it was roundly criticized as unethical by 10 leading professors of ethics, including evangelicals such as the Rev. George G. Hunter III of Asbury Theological Seminary and Richard V. Pierard of Gordon College (citing A. Cooperman, “Pastors Issue Directive in Response to Reelection Tactic, Washington Post, 18 August 2004).

IRD claims, in fact, to have the largest mailing list in the UMC, with a declared goal of eventually obtaining a million church member addresses (citing M. Tooley, “UMAction Briefing,” Spring 2005).

An exceptionally useful resource site maintained by a United Methodist minister, Rev. Steven D. Martin, who is Executive Director of Vital Visions Incorporated, at www.ird-info.com, further documents the use of unethical stealth tactics by the IRD to take over local and international structures of the UMC.

Rev. Martin reports that his concerns about the activity of the IRD within local Conferences stems from an incident that occurred at an Annual Conference meeting of his own Conference, the Holston Conference, at which the IRD sought to elect slates of candidates sympathetic to it and its goals to control the Conference. On one occasion a Sunday School class within the Conference presented the Holston Conference with resolutions lifted verbatim from the IRD website—but with no acknowledgement of their source.

Martin also notes that the Coalition for United Methodist Accountability (CUMA), an organization comprised of the IRD, Good News, and the Confessing Movement, has joined to finance legal expenses for five individuals who are seeking to control the General Board on Church and Society’s (GBCS) use of the United Methodist Building Endowment Fund. This follows a vote at the 2004 General Conference that defeated a resolution “to cripple the financing and mission” of GBCS.

According to Martin, the five individuals filing suit have only a tenuous connection to the GBCS, and all were recruited and are being funded by Mark Tooley, Director of the IRD’s UMAction, and/or his law firm in Arlington, Virginia, Gammon and Grange—though several of the litigants have stated that they do not know how their legal action is being financed. One of the litigants, John Patton Meadows, has admitted in a deposition that he had received confidential legal documents belonging to the GBCS prior to or during the 2004 General Conference.

Martin concludes that the IRD functions as a strategy center, not as a renewal group; in Weaver’s view, the “IRD is a secular-funded right-wing political organization unaffiliated with any church.”

Martin’s site contains links to resolutions of two Annual Conferences about the IRD and its activities, both of which appear to have been brought to the 2008 General Conference. One of these resolutions was passed by the 2007 NY Annual Conference.

Based on its assessment of the activities of the IRD within the United Methodist Church, the NY Annual Conference concludes that the IRD agenda is “to effectively eliminate the UMC’s social witness,” and the IRD distorts and is not grounded in authentic Wesleyan theology and its vision of the church.

Based on its observation of the activities of IRD, the NY Annual Conference Resolution judges that IRD uses “hardball tactics” within the UMC to accomplish the following: using controversial issues, including homosexuality, as wedge issues; seeking to drive out persons they do not agree with, including calls for liberals to leave the church; misrepresenting their distorted, inflammatory, sensationalized, and sometimes deceptive commentaries as factual news accounts of issues and events in the Church in a way intended to mislead and manipulate their audience; and using a piece written by Mark Tooley to attack the 2006 session of the New York Annual Conference and characterize it as “more like a MoveOn.org rally than a church convention.”

Condemning “the hardball, deceptive and divisive tactics of the Institute on Religion and Democracy and its UMAction Committee,” the NY Annual Conference resolution calls on “all United Methodists not to support the IRD and to reject the agenda it works to impose on the UMC and the tactics it uses to advance them.” The resolution also asks the “IRD to disband its UMAction committee and cease its efforts to impose its agenda on the UMC.”

In similar fashion, based on its dealings with and observation of the IRD, the Desert Southwest Annual Conference asks the 2008 General Assembly to accept a report prepared for its 2003 Annual Conference, which found that “the agendas of the Institute on Religion and Democracy and its subcommittee UM Action, were inconsistent with the mission, nature, and theology of the United Methodist Church.”

The Desert Southwest Conference also calls on the GBCS to create and distribute study materials on the IRD, its agenda and tactics, for the use of all United Methodist Annual Conferences, as well as the Council of Bishops, the Commission on the Status and Role of Women, the National Council of Churches of Christ, and the World Council of Churches.

The unholy financial alliances of IRD and its affiliates are well-researched by Andrew J. Weaver et al. in an article I cited in a comment on my blog yesterday--the 11 Aug. 2006 "Neocon Catholics Target Mainline Protestants" (see www.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=142). Weaver notes that the founders of IRD are “paid political operatives who work ceaselessly to discredit mainline Protestant leaders and their Christian communions” (my emphasis; citing S. Swecker, Hard Ball on Holy Ground, 2005; and Weaver et al., “The Radical Right Assault on Mainline Protestantism and the National Council of Churches of Christ,” Talk to Action, 2005).

Weaver notes that prominent Catholic leaders who have had key leadership roles within IRD—including Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak, George Weigel, Mary Ellen Bork, and Mary Ann Glendon—“confer their prestige and considerable power to encourage right-wing donors to finance IRD" (my emphasis). In his assessment, these neoconservative political leaders are “key links to the patrons of IRD,” who include Richard Mellon Scaife, Howard Ahmanson, and the Bradley, Coors, Smith-Richardson, Randolph, and Olin Foundations (citing (Media Transparency, “The Money Behind Conservative Media: Funders,” 2006).

As Weaver points out, Michael Novak, who is a co-founder of IRD, has been “a well-paid activist at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) for more than two decades” (my emphasis). Other influential figures at AEI include Lynne Cheney and Newt Gingrich. According to Weaver, between 1985 and 2004, AEI received $42,342,101—largely from right-wing funders. In the same time frame, Novak received $1,527,397 from the Olin and Bradley foundations (citing Media Transparency, “The Money Behind the Media: American Enterprise Institute,” 2006).

According to Weaver, between 1985 and 2004, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where George Weigel is a key player, received $12, 535, 574—largely from the same people who fund IRD (citing Media Transparency, “The Money Behind the Media: Ethics and Public Policy Center,” 2006).

In Weaver’s judgment, “All of these benefactors have a common political aim, which is to neutralize and overturn the social justice tradition of mainline Protestant churches because they are in tension with unfettered capitalism” (citing National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, “Conservative Foundations Prevail in Shaping Public Policies,” 1997; Swecker, Hard Ball, 2005; and F. Clarkson, “The Battle for the Mainline Churches,”Public Eye Magazine, Spring 2006).

Dirty money, dirty goals, and dirty tactics: Weaver notes that the IRD has used its power, its influence with wealthy right-wing donors, and its media connections, to smear and disseminate rumors about (among others) Archbishop Desmond Tutu; Rev. Jim Wallis; Rabbi Michael Lerner; Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams; Bishop Mark Hanson, Presiding Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, etc.

Weaver’s “IRD/Good News: How the Right Wing Targets United Methodist Women” (cited above) documents the IRD’s dissemination of outright lies about gay people—a tactic that has earned the IRD “the endorsement and encouragement of a terrorist group, the American White Knights of the Klu Klux Klan”(my emphasis; citing “KKK kkk Ku Klux Klan jew Jew kkk KKK Judaism,” Queers on Fire, 2005; F. Clark, “Krusaders for Krist’s Kingdom, Slacktivist Weblog, 2005; and C. Currie, “Ku Klux Klan Joins Republican Party, Aligned with Institute on Religion and Democracy in Protesting Church Conference,” 2005).

Weaver notes as well that the website of the IRD-affiliate Good News/RENEW links to the website of the Un-Official Confessing Movement (which invites disgruntled United Methodists to leave the church and take UMC property with them), on which materials making bogus claims linking Nazism to homosexuality appear. Specifically, the Confessing website cites the Pink Triangle, which falsely claims that the Nazi party was controlled by gays (though Nazism executed thousands of gay people).

These claims are characterized by Stephen Feinstein, Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, as akin to flat-earth science. Feinstein attributes these lies about the connection of Nazism to homosexuality to “a right-wing Christian cult” (citing S. Feinstein, “Letters from Readers,” Star Tribune, Minneapolis, 20 March 2003).

Further Digging: The UMC and the IRD

After yesterday’s posting about the activities of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) re: the United Methodist Church, I’ve been digging. I’m trying to resist saying that I’ve been digging in the dirt, but that’s surely what it feels like, the more I inform myself about the IRD.

First, it’s important to note that the IRD is overtly political. It’s “Republican-party aligned” and was organized and funded by Republican operatives. According to United Church of Christ minister Mark Curry in an article entitled “Mark Tooley’s Election-Year Lies” (28 July 2006),

Tooley's IRD was set-up and is funded by voices in the Republican Party that hope to undermine the mainline Christian tradition of prophetically speaking out on issues of war, peace and economic justice. God is not a Republican or a Democrat, as Jim Wallis likes to say, but IRD confuses the Gospel message with the Republican Party platform on each and every issue—see http://chuckcurrie.blogs.com/chuck_currie/2006/07/mark_tooleys_el.html.

Mark Tooley is Director of the IRD’s UMAction committee. As his biography on the IRD website notes (see www.theird.org), prior to joining IRD, Tooley worked eight years for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In addition to serving as Director of UMAction, Tooley serves as a board member of Good News, part of the cluster of well-organized right-wing pressure groups within the United Methodist Church involved in the distribution of cell-phones to African delegates at this year’s General Conference.

Tooley’s CIA ties, and his lack of theological training, are noted in a 16 May 2006 article entitled “Hardball Tactics, The Mainline and IRD” by Christian Century writer Jason Byassee (www.christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=2060). The article is a review and discussion of Steven Swecker’s Hard Ball on Holy Ground: The Religious Right v. the Mainline for the Church’s Soul.

Byassee’s analysis of Mark Tooley’s overt political agenda and lack of theological background is incisive. He asks,

And precisely who is Mark Tooley to pass such judgment on the Methodist Council of Bishops? A former CIA operative with no formal theological training. Journalists often use Tooley's material when they report on church squabbles, since he offers a "conservative" soundbite to balance the bishops' "liberal" voice.

Byassee notes that since its founding by neo-conservative Republican political operatives, IRD “has been monitoring mainline churches for political statements that are out of step with the views of rank-and-file members.” It focuses primarily on the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the Episcopal Church.

In its attempt to curb the use of scripture and traditional social teachings within these churches to critique contemporary American culture (and, in particular, conservative American political leaders), the IRD has previously “operated largely under the radar.” One of its most persistent tactics is the sending of unsolicited mailings to members of the three targeted religious groups, seeking to spread discontent with the direction the denominations have taken, insofar as it diverges from the Republican political agenda.

When the United Methodist bishops spoke out against the Iraq War, Tooley immediately sent faxes to the mainstream media, including Christian Century, attacking the bishops for meddling in political matters beyond their purview. As noted previously, the IRD has been very successful at seeding right-wing soundbites in the mainstream media. For some time now, these have dominated mainstream-media coverage of the activities of leading U.S. churches, and have allowed IRD operatives to suggest that their right-wing attack on the United Methodist, Episcopalian, and Presbyterian churches is an attempt to “balance” the “activism” of such churches.

According to Byassee, Swecker’s Hard Ball on Holy Ground exposes the thick connections between IRD, with its attempt to control the mainline churches in the U.S., and funders including Richard Mellon Scaife, Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, and the John Birch Society. The Ahmansons have expressed support for a “Christian Reconstructionist” agenda that would impose Levitical law on America. In the view of Hard Ball on Holy Ground, “the bottom line [of such IRD funders] is support for neoconservative economic policy, by which they mean the shredding of governmental regulation of business and of any social safety net, as well as the elimination of almost all taxation.”

I take this to mean that the real concern of IRD and its funders is not the church’s theology, per se, or ethical questions like the place of gay and lesbian persons in church and society. The real bottom line is money. And that makes the callous, cynical, calculated use of the real lives of real gay human beings in the money- and power-oriented agenda of the IRD all the more cruel and unjustifiable. How can any Christians accept such dirty money, or buy into an agenda that in any way justifies the IRD as yet another among many competing voices that can claim authenticity in Christian debates?

Byassee concludes that, “[t]he IRD's tactics often seem based more on Tooley's CIA experience than on Christian behavior.” To illustrate the point, he cites a section of Swecker's book which notes that, at the retirement dinner of United Methodist Bishop Joseph Sprague, a favorite target of the IRD, Mark Tooley’s assistant John Lomperis showed up to tape record comments and snap pictures of all participants.

Mark Tooley’s CIA background, his use of CIA-style tactics in his position as Director of UMAction, and the deep pocket-funding that supports the covert activities of the IRD, are also noted in a 28 April press release of Reconciling Ministries about General Conference (see www.generalconference2008.org/2008/04/united-methodis.html). This press release notes that according to a 25 February 25 2004, investigative report by Matt Smith in the San Francisco Weekly, the IRD had spent up to $4 million by that year in financing conservative political groups within the three denominations it has targeted.

The reference to John Lomperis in Jason Byassee’s article is fascinating to me, since, in tracking the ties of the Florida UMC bishop with whom I have had dealings—Bishop Timothy Whitaker—to the IRD, I find that in November 2007, Bishop Whitaker gave an interview to Mr. Lomperis. The interview is on the IRD website at www.theird.org/NETCOMMUNITY/Page.aspx?pid=295&srcid=183. The IRD (along with a number of the affiliate right-wing groups in the United Methodist Church) have published and promoted Bishop Whitaker's work, including a letter he wrote critiquing Bishop Sprague for his political activities as a bishop.

It is interesting to note that, in the interview, Bishop Whitaker offers criticisms of the cultural captivity of progressive Christians very similar to those set forth in his essay on homosexuality and the church. In my open letter to Bishop Whitaker posted on this blog at http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/04/open-letter-to-bishop-timothy-w_16.html, I note my concern with the Bishop Whitaker’s suggestion that, in defending the full inclusion of gay and lesbian human beings in the church and acknowledging the full humanity of these brothers and sisters in Christ, the church is capitulating to cultural norms.

In my view, precisely the opposite is the case. In seeking to defend LGBT believers against social oppression that is widespread—and can result in loss of jobs for no reason other than one’s sexual orientation, in housing and employment discrimination, in being turned away from a hospital where one’s partner is receiving treatment, or in manifold forms of violence—in seeking to defend LGBT human beings against such widespread social oppression, the church is speaking a countercultural word of hope and salvation to the culture at large.

Because I believe that the church pays a price—the price of costly grace—in standing with the oppressed, including LGBT persons, I am not convinced by Bishop Whitaker’s argument in his IRD interview with Mr. Lomperis. Bishop Whitaker states,

My main concern with a lot of the voices of progressive Christianity is the quality of the theological discourse that comes from them. They seem to presuppose that certain assumptions embedded in modern Western societies and cultures represent reality, and they don’t recognize how ethno-centric those assumptions can be. And then they think that the purpose of theology is to express in religious form the presuppositions of the culture. There doesn’t seem to be a seriousness of theological purpose in their discourse. And I think that that makes it difficult for others to take their thinking as seriously as they would like.

I’m sorry to say so, but something in this argument seems a bit disingenuous to me. Both here and in his essay on the church and homosexuality, Bishop Whitaker asks for serious theological dialogue about issues such as homosexuality.

Once again, I have to ask Bishop Whitaker in response to this suggestion: How can serious theological dialogue about homosexuality occur in the United Methodist Church when openly gay believers are not invited to the table at General Conference?

How can serious theological dialogue about homosexuality occur in the United Methodist Church when openly gay employees, including theologians, do not have job security in United Methodist institutions?

How can serious theological dialogue about homosexuality occur in the United Methodist Church when openly gay employees can be fired without job evaluations, in United Methodist institutions that have no stated non-discrimination policies, in right-to-work states that permit at-will firing?

After reading Bishop Whitaker’s interview with Mark Tooley’s assistant John Lomperis, I can understand a bit better some of the issues at stake in my unjust firing at a United Methodist institution

When a group such as IRD is so well-funded by powerful wealthy donors who have access to political power as well, it takes courage and conviction for church institutions to stand up to power, to speak truth to power. There is a price to be paid when the church refuses to dance with the devil. That price is the path of costly grace. Where money is involved, where dirty money coalesces with behind-the-scenes power grabs, discipleship is costly.

But it is only when the church speaks out of the experience of costly discipleship that it will be heard. In his interview with John Lomperis, Bishop Whitaker addresses one of the pet themes of the IRD and other religious conservatives: the purported demise of mainstream Christian churches.

In the view of Lomperis et al., the churches are in decline because they have not held a countercultural position regarding “traditional values.” Lomperis, Tooley, and their allies including Bishop Whitaker, propose that returning the churches to “traditional” gospel stances on family life, marriage, and so forth will cause people to stream back to the mainline churches.

In my view, such theological and sociological analysis of the departure of many young people from the churches today is misplaced—it is flatly wrong. Young people today are leaving the churches because they do not see the churches standing courageously for human rights in the cultural contexts in which the churches find themselves, at this point in history.

The churches could do nothing more prophetic today, nothing more countercultural, than to invite everyone to their table. If the churches abolished the lesser table and provided unambiguous witness to the unity and welcome of all believers, including LGBT believers, around the one table of the Lord, they would speak a clear, unambiguous word to culture that would, in my view, do much to rehabilitate the churches among younger church members.

Why keep telling this story, harping on these themes? Thirst for retribution? Unrighteous rage?

I hope not, though those whom the churches treat with the conspicuous injustice often doled out to LGBT human beings will hunger and thirst for justice. It is human (and I would suggest, holy as well) to do so—and in doing so, to include in one’s quest for justice all those to whom one is linked in the experience of injustice.

No, I keep speaking out not because I want retribution, but because I have to do so. It is only in telling our stories that we re-claim our humanity, when that humanity is denied in acts of gross injustice. We have no choice to speak except from where we’ve been placed.

My experience at the United Methodist university

has become the starting point for my attempt to unravel the plot of a portion of my own life narrative, insofar as that narrative now intersects with Bishop 's

life, with the life of his church, with the life of the university

We are called as followers of the Christ to ponder our lives as stories of grace, to make sense of them in light of the gospel.

When we are subjected to injustice, particularly by institutions that profess to value justice, we try in every way possible to understand: to read, to research, to deliberate—to make sense of the gross injustice we have experienced. Many of us eventually arrive at the conclusion that our experiences of pain and dispossession at the hands of the church are actually gifts, opportunities to give witness—to the saving love of a God who despises no one, and who, in particular, embraces the least among us; and to the power of the gospel proclaimed by the church, when the church refuses to sell its soul to the wealthy and powerful, and when it looks at its cultural world not through their eyes but through the eyes of the dispossessed.

We keep on keeping on, from where the church has placed us. And we eventually discover that this place, and our stories, are full of grace, despite the church’s refusal to recognize this grace.